ABSTRACT
The coupling of ‘women’ and ‘punishment’ occurs only infrequently in penological literature 2 . This is not surprising. Theories of punishment are usually expected to be gender-neutral: the state punishes, the citizen submits and the legitimacy of the punishment is debated according to the jurisprudential principles of the time. Of course, punishments are meted out in a range of relationships characterised by imbalances of power and/or legitimated rule-enforcement institutions; but, by and large, even in the literature that has focused on the deliberate imposition of pains or deprivations in return for wrongdoing, there seems to have been a reluctance to conceive of punishments as being gender-specific.
